Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities

CLARIAH Jan Odijk

EuroRisNet+ Workshop, Lisbon, 2013-07-05

Overview• Background• Goals• Relation with companies• Challenges

Background• CLARIN and DARIAH on ESFRI Roadmap (2006)• EU-funded preparatory projects (2008-2011)• Resulted (inter alia) in CLARIN ERIC (since 2012),

DARIAH ERIC coming • CLARIN and DARIAH on the 2008 NL National

Roadmap, CLARIN funded (CLARIN-NL, 2009-2015)

• 2011 National Roadmap: CLARIN-NL and DARIAH-NL join forces resulting in CLARIAH

• partially successful: put on roadmap and obtained ‘seed money’

• 2013 National Roadmap: revised proposal to be submitted

Goals• A technical research infrastructure in which a

humanities researcher– Can find all data relevant for the research– Can find all tools relevant for the research– Can apply the tools to the data without any technical

background or ad-hoc adaptations• Inter alia tools for search in and through the data

– Can store data resulting from the research– Can store tools resulting from the research

• A distributed infrastructure based on one or more centres per country.

Goals• Focus in CLARIN on research using language

resources• Focus in DARIAH broader• Focus in CLARIAH on

– Linguistics and language resources (esp. text)– Social History (esp. structured databases)– Media Studies (esp. audio-visual data)

Relation with Companies• Primary user group is academic researchers• Good support by companies

– For CLARIN-NL– For CLARIAH

• Interest because of technology to extract information from a variety of structured and unstructured (text, AV-data) data (e.g. sentiment/opinion mining, IBM’s Watson)

• Fits in nicely with NL’s Top Sector Policy• Role of Companies

– User / reflection group, as potential (secondary) users– Implementation of certain aspects as subcontractor– Data Providers

Challenges (1)• CLARIN-NL partially organized as a project,

partially as a programme.• This offered much opportunity to

– flexibly react to new developments– bring in more partners– react to ideas and proposals coming from our prospective

users. – Set up (unanticipated) international cooperation (e.g. with

Flanders)

Challenges (1)• Most other national CLARIN projects are tightly

packed projects without this flexibility– Given the distributed character of the infrastructure, this

makes it difficult to do things together• Recommendation:

– National projects should leave enough room for unanticipated international cooperation and other developments

– their funding agencies should take this into account in their evaluation

Challenges (2): Sustainability• Work out a business model, supported by the

funding agencies, to guarantee the sustainability of services provided by the Centres in the infrastructure after the project has finished

• May require some policy changes with the funders (e.g. allow and even require funding of data management)

Challenges (3): IPR• Use of copy-righted data for academic research

should be allowed without requiring explicit permission

Challenges (4)• National Roadmaps are not synchronized among

countries– Big Differences in start-up and running time for each country

(e.g. NL 2009, DE 2011, others not yet)• Can be handled in a distributed infrastructure, but

it is not ideal• A limited form of synchronisation is desirable

Thank you for your attention

For more information

www.clariah.nlwww.clarin.nl

CLARIAH: Industrial Interest